why a rich ivy league white boy became a muslim

The following words, written by one of my teachers from the U.K., summarize why I became Muslim in 1998, why I remain Muslim in 2013, and why I hope to always be a Muslim until my last breath on this Earth, if God so wills.

“Further, if man’s nature is not rooted in the metaphysical, if his destiny does not lie in some higher place, then his existence is desolate and meaningless, and can be articulated only through values and artforms which are broken evocations of ugliness and chaos.

No culture since Adam has lived in deeper ignorance of what man truly is: a symmetrical, noble form enshrining a soul, an organ capable of such translucence that it can, when the senses and passions which distract it are stilled, form a window onto that Reality of which this world offers no more than a distorted reflection. For those human beings who have been granted this state of awakening, the real world which they survey is truer than anything they had known here-below. All of us will see the real world, the akhira, at death. But only the Prophets fully know of it before they die, and hence can warn their contemporaries. The revelations which God gives them, and which they give to mankind, are thus the only sources of meaning and understanding which will ever be available. To hold to them is to cling to a rope let down from God, while to let go is to fall ineluctably into chaos.

Muslims are aware that today’s dominant culture (and we should recall that its dominance lies exclusively on the political and economic plane), is built on a single determining fact: the considered rejection of Christianity. This apostasy was the logical result of Europe’s discovery that the Bible was a historical product, a distorted text in which the words of the Prophets could no longer be heard with confidence. Cut off from any reliable access to the transcendent, Europe’s outlook could henceforth seek descriptions of the world only through the physical sciences, which were by definition incapable of yielding information about the akhira, or about man’s meaning rather than his material surroundings. Modern man thus appears as the absolute antithesis of the man of iman [faith], the man of secure awareness of the divine Reality and the tremendous destiny which awaits those who respond to it.” (Abdal Hakim Murad, in the preface to The Lives of Man by Imam al-Haddad, pp. viii-ix)

[…] follow it, and show me the false as false and bless me to avoid it.” I was willing to affirm the Prophethood of a man I have never met who lived in 7th century Arabia, may peace and blessings be upon him. So I hope I have no […]